


The Pumpkin on Hillmaker's Street

by DictionaryWrites



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 16:47:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8168912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites
Summary: Emoji prompts were handed out to those in attendance at Writers' Soc, and this was one of mine inspired by the emoji prompt. There's a pumpkin carved in the wall on Hillmaker's Street.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the following emoji:
> 
>  

There's a pumpkin carved in the wall on Hillmaker's Street.

It's not especially big, nor especially small, nor especially good.

But there's a pumpkin carved in the wall on Hillmaker's Street.

It's carved into one of the heavy, grey mason's bricks that make up the wall outside Filigree Park, and it was carved with a knife or a chisel or maybe a screwdriver: it's messy, and some of the lines are twisted and just out of place. The pumpkin is round, with its carved top, and it has a face like a Jack-O-Lantern. The pumpkin has eyes like boomerangs, drawn at a curve, and little eyebrows: its mouth is a squiggly, open mess of crumbling concrete, like the artist got too impatient.

The pumpkin carved in the wall on Hillmaker's Street has been there for a long, long time.

The children walk past it every day when they finish at school, skipping under the thick, green trees in Filigree Park, and they laugh at it, and copy its face, and trace over its messy, stony lines with their little fingers.

Mary Codstop stuck gum in one of the eyebrows once, but it was gone the next day.

The pumpkin carved in the wall on Hillmaker's Street is always, always clean.

We don't know who carved it. We don't know why. All of the other bricks have spray paint or marker or chalk – propaganda, names, declarations that Tony loves Lucy and that Jimmy likes tits – but the pumpkin has its own brick, and any writing left on its surface is gone by the next day, even though no one cleans it.

Filigree Park is a lovely place in the day time, with thick beds of flowers, chirping birds, wide bowed trees that seem to envelope you under their comfortable, green umbrellas. At night time, Filigree Park is dark, and foreboding.

You oughtn't walk in Filigree Park at night, the mothers and the fathers say, but people don't always listen.

Mary Codstop was late home one night, and she cut through Filigree Park: she stopped by the grey mason's bricks that make up the wall, and she checked her phone for a text from her father. She didn't see the flickering street lamp, or the shadows on the wall, or the shimmer of the blade in the dim light.

But when she fell, she saw the blood spatter on the mouth of the pumpkin carved in the wall on Hillmaker's Street. Mary Codstop saw it spatter in thick, red drops, and saw it drip slowly down the grey mason's brick. Mary Codstop stared, and stared, and stared, and never closed her eyes again.

And the pumpkin carved in the wall on Hillmaker's Street licked its lips, and waited.


End file.
